


oh, what a life

by buckybear (antoniohiggins)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Lonely Steve Rogers, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Protective Steve Rogers, Reminiscing, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Suicidal Thoughts (brief and minor), Temporary Character Death, he just loses everybody he loves, mentions of tony sam wanda nat peggy and a few others, poor baby, sorry if it's bad but i had an idea and i couldn't resist writing it, steve misses his bucky ok, this is my first ever mcu fic!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-30 23:17:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15761754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antoniohiggins/pseuds/buckybear
Summary: we all know what tony would do right after infinity war ends, but what about steve?~~~in which steve rogers visits an old war memorial no one should ever have to see





	oh, what a life

**Author's Note:**

> title from the song 'oh, what a life' by american authors

Nobody knows exactly where it is that Steve Rogers runs off to as soon as Thanos disappears. Sure, they can track him to Europe, somewhere in Germany, but they’ll never guess where or why. Bucky would know, if he were there. Steve took him once to see it. He would know right away.

But he doesn’t. Because he’s gone.

So Steve sits alone for hours at a time in a small field marked as American Territory. There are probably less than a hundred crosses littered around and he isn’t sure if that even constitutes as a cemetery. But still, it houses men he used to call brothers. Plus, two more he shouldn’t even be able to see.

There are two graves at the back of the field, under a big oak tree. Separated from the others because of course they were. Of course even in death those two couldn’t be lost amongst the sea of men willing to lay down their lives. Those two couldn’t be kept apart and clearly it had no exceptions.

The ground was never broken, not even sixty years ago. No bodies to bury, simply headstones. A small engraved plaque rests in the ground below both white crosses.

_Steven Grant Rogers_

His fingers trace the words as if they’re foreign to him. It’s just like the first time he saw it. Almost alien.

_1918 - 1945_

Wouldn’t that be nice? Just a simple date to sum it all up. A start and a beginning. He’ll never get that now. Now when he really dies…there will be a beginning and a pause. A pause resumed sixty years later only to find its end over a decade after the beginning.

He didn’t want this. God, who would possibly want this? Everyone he ever loved was gone. All except one. The only one that ever really mattered, but yet now he was gone too. When you feel foreign everywhere in the world, you have to hold on to the one thing that still feels like home. Even when that one thing is ripping you from everything that was finally starting to feel familiar.

No, he told himself. No, they were better now. The accords were so long ago by then that every one of them had bigger problems. They all had dead people now.

Just…Steve more so than others.

Two whole lifetimes worth of dead people and fate just had to take the only one who stood by him in both.

_James Buchanan Barnes_

He was less sure of himself as he felt the cold metal lettering of the second gravestone beneath his fingers. This one didn’t feel right, it never did. Sure, maybe because, like Steve’s own, it too wasn’t meant to be.

But maybe because now it was wrong. Now it held a date nearing a century off. No, he didn’t die back in the forties, it was 2018. It was almost an injustice, he thought.

He deserved so much and not even the date is real anymore. God, it hurt to read those numbers because even if he was gone, even if his person on this Earth was gone, the least they could do was give him something real. Something definitively true.   
  
For so much of Bucky Barnes’ life he had no structure and definition. He was a machine and it broke Steve’s heart even more than he’d ever thought possible to see those lies across that slab of stone.

He pulled a small pouch from his coat pocket, slowly unwrapping it to reveal a small tube and a brush. Paint. He squeezed out a small amount onto the back of his hand, carefully rolling the top of the brush through the pure white paint.

His hands shook more than they ever used to as he added barely more than a handful of numbers. He didn’t really care anymore whether or not he was supposed to do things. If someone came and told him he was defacing the graves, they probably wouldn’t expect for it to be his own.

As he stated that those slowly drying letters and numbers, it was almost like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. The truth, as painful as it may be, was where it should be. He stared at the slew of dates across the two empty graves and for some strange reason, it felt like it was true. He felt his eyes begin to water, something it had been so long since he’d let himself do, and before he knew it he couldn’t stop. He cried the first time he lost him and he cried again the last.

He could practically feel himself back in that broken down pub downing drink after drink just praying to feel something but getting nothing for his efforts.

But the one sinking feeling that’s hanging over his head is that, even after everything he did to keep him safe, Bucky’s gone. _His_ Bucky, as he has been aptly named all those years ago. Except this time Peggy was gone too. But so was Sam, and Wanda, and even Stark’s goddamned _kid_ he was starting to like. Everyone in his life either hated him or was dead too. That’s just what you get when you wake up in a generation you don’t belong in.

He did everything in, and frankly, out his power to protect Bucky when he finally got him back. Hell, he even agreed to let him go back into cryo in Wakanda just so they could potentially have more time together.

Yet they still got more than most. They got double what most couples could only dream of, yet he was selfish. Steve Rogers, America’s ex-golden boy, was jealous.

But the universe was cruel to him. It had been ever since he was born with a hefty twenty-three percent chance of surviving to the age of five. It was cruel when it gave him the beautiful gift of James Buchanan Barnes. Someone who deserved so much better than the rotten life Steve dragged him into. The universe was cruel when the price of keeping his only family safe was losing every friend he’s ever made in the last decade, and they made it seem too good to resist.

The universe was cruel when it made him long so desperately to truly be six feet under the plate that held his name.

Fate played him like a fiddle from start to pause and from resume to the end. He was sure it wouldn’t be the end of the torment, but he honestly couldn’t imagine how much worse it could really get. What could possibly hurt more?

Losing Tony? Natasha? Or really any of the others left? From the bottom of his heart, he didn’t think it would break him any more than he already was. So much of his life was gone through the years, and if the universe decided to toss in another handful, so be it.

He’d just stay where he should be.

Side by side with his Bucky, but all alone nonetheless.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! i hope you enjoyed this! i've never written for the mcu before, so i hope this turned out okay lol
> 
> if you have any requests, feel free to comment ideas! 
> 
> xxx -elle


End file.
